MyExperiment.org is a social networking site and marketplace aimed at scientists who use workflows and services for their research. It allows users to publish, discover, share, and reuse experimental artifacts like workflows. The site aims to make these tools easy to use with a familiar social media-style interface. Key goals include crossing boundaries between individual experiments, disciplines, and systems to facilitate collaboration and intellectual fusion. Challenges include addressing issues around user incentives, metadata, provenance, intellectual property, and quality control as experiments are shared in an open yet curated environment.

1. Adapted from a talk by... Carole Goble University of Manchester, UK

2. FaceBook for Workflow e-Scientists myexperiment.org

3. myExperiment.org A community social network A market place A gateway to other publishing environments A platform for launching workflows Encapsulated myExperiment Objects Mindful publication

4. Who is it by and for? Young people. With “MTV” thinking. Familiar with games. And shopping. And social networks. Make our tools like these. Say NO to 1970s interfaces Say NO to restrictive tooling

5. Principles Focus on making it easy to publish information Discovering and sharing experimental artefacts Publishing results to standard community repositories Publishing scholarly output Familiar social networking / web paradigms Keeping it free and fluid and creative. Me-Science. Crossing system boundaries Trans-workflow Crossing discipline boundaries Multi-disciplinary, Inter-disciplinary, Trans-disciplinary Clustering expertise Intellectual fusion outside discipline. We-Science. Life Science, Social Science, Astronomy, Chemistry 26/2/2007 | myExperiment | Slide

6. Social Space & Shop: Semantic Challenge Shopping for Workflows, Services Components. Aggregating workflows and provenance. Fuel for diagnostics. Find a similar workflow. Organised metadata Identity and Ontology Authority Open tagging, folksonomies, blogging, profiles, recommendations, social network analysis e-tracking

7. webTaverna GUI - main

8. Warehouse or Federation Community web site? Distributed stores? Mixed identity regimes Identity authority Multiple my Experiments Publish what I want when I want. Open Archives Initiative

9. Portals, wikis and community repositories

10. Science is not Pop Music Scientists are not Schoolgirls OpenWetWare is open Some Rights Reserved. Protection as well as sharing. Curation and Policing. Quality, Reliability, Validation, Safety, Persistence, Longevity, Palpability? Pollution and viral infections. Privacy, IP, Authorship attribution and guarantees. Provenance can help. In-house results mixed with community resources. Maximum ease of sharing to achieve collective benefits – so workflows are "hackable" and "remixable". When does your workflow stop being your workflow? “ Hell is other people’s workflows” (as Jean Paul Sartre might have said)

11. Small labs or individuals Specialist workflows Expert and inexpert Leveraging and Serving The Long Tail of Users Big labs & big groups Common de facto workflows

12. Users Add Value Adoption depends on lots of shared services and lots of shared workflows Incentive models for Scientists to share? Fame, reputation and funding. Not being second; not being misrepresented. Add value to my service / application Get my tool / codes / dataset used Collaborate to compete. Good citizenship. Authorship recognition and credit. Protect my turf The Selfish Scientist – e-Science is me-Science

13. From me-Science to we-Science Tribal bonding and sharing Crossing Tribal Boundaries Across communities and disciplines (MIT) “ Intellectual Fusion” & “Swarming” Understanding outside my expertise. E.g. sources of error Serious metadata issues. Serious social issues.

14. Technical Challenges Workflow warehouse / federation of repositories Open Archives Initiative. Federated myExperiments. Sharepoint. Social space + organised rich site Social discourse + organised service / workflow space using curated semantics. Granularity and identifiers Rolling-up provenance. Id resolution Open vs protected content Quality, Reliability, Validation, Safety, Intellectual Property, Ownership, Secrecy, A duty of guardianship. Curation? Policing? Local data mixed with shared resources Desktop integration Google gadgets for workflows. Interacting with workflows through Office products. Workflow execution (WHIP) Workflows Hosted in Portals project Socialisation of communities Enabling Scientists added value through applications and collaborative tagging ©

15. Conclusions Please join in at http://www.myexperiment.org